Alexander Hamilton

by Ron Chernow

He railed against the baleful precedent that would be set if the legislature exiled an entire category of people without hearings or trials. If that happened, “no man can be safe, nor know when he may be the innocent victim of a prevailing faction. The name of liberty applied to such a government would be a mockery of common sense.”

The tone of politics had rapidly grown very harsh. Some poison was released into the American political atmosphere that was not put back into the bottle for a generation. As after any revolution, purists were vigilant for signs of ideological backsliding and departures from the one true faith.

“George Clinton’s friends considered him a man of the people; his enemies saw him as a demagogue.”

Alexander Hamilton was haunted by George Clinton for reasons that transcended his political style. Hamilton’s besetting fear was that American democracy would be spoiled by demagogues who would mouth populist shibboleths to conceal their despotism. George Clinton, Thomas Jefferson, and Aaron Burr all came to incarnate that dread for Hamilton.

Hamilton might have tolerated such flaws had it not been for one unforgivable sin: Clinton favored New York to the detriment of national unity.

Where Madison thought a weak republic would only invite disorder, Jefferson reacted to the turmoil with aplomb. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” he told Madison loftily from Paris, “and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.”26 To Colonel William Smith, Jefferson sent his famous reassurance: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”27 While Hamilton feared that disorder would feed on itself, the more hopeful and complacent Jefferson thought that periodic excesses would correct themselves.

Of all the founders, Hamilton probably had the gravest doubts about the wisdom of the masses and wanted elected leaders who would guide them. This was the great paradox of his career: his optimistic view of America’s potential coexisted with an essentially pessimistic view of human nature. His faith in Americans never quite matched his faith in America itself.

Too often, his political vision harked back to a past in which well-bred elites made decisions for less-educated citizens. This contradicted the advanced economic thinking expressed in his vision of a fluid, meritocratic elite, open to talented outsiders such as himself.

Hamilton seized the chance to enunciate his first major statement on foreign policy, noting that great nations follow their interests and contesting the chimerical view that America should concentrate on domestic tranquillity while disregarding its interests abroad: “No governm[en]t could give us tranquillity and happiness at home, which did not possess sufficient stability and strength to make us respectable abroad.”71 He also combated the fantasy that the Atlantic Ocean would protect America from future conflicts. With these fighting words, Hamilton splashed a cold dose of realism on the sentimental isolationism of the time.

Paranoid thinking seems to be a legacy of all revolutions, with purists searching for signs of heresy, and the American experience was no exception.

The fate of the democratic experiment depended upon political intellectuals who might have been marginalized at other periods.

Hamilton believed that revolutions ended in tyranny because they glorified revolution as a permanent state of mind. A spirit of compromise and a concern with order were needed to balance the quest for liberty.

This falling-out was to be more than personal, for the rift between Hamilton and Madison precipitated the start of the two-party system in America.

The comment smacked of aristocratic disdain for the self-made man. In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton.

If Washington was the father of the country and Madison the father of the Constitution, then Alexander Hamilton was surely the father of the American government.

“Now, mark my words. So long as we are a young and virtuous people, this instrument will bind us together in mutual interests, mutual welfare, and mutual happiness. But when we become old and corrupt, it will bind us no longer.”

The low point of his presidency came in June and July 1798. While Adams wrestled with Hamilton over the ranking of Washington’s major generals, Congress enacted four infamous laws designed to muzzle dissent and browbeat the Republicans into submission. They were known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. The Naturalization Act, passed on June 18, lengthened from five to fourteen years the period necessary to become a naturalized citizen with full voting rights. The Alien Act of June 25 gave the president the power to deport, without a hearing or even a reasonable explanation, any foreign-born residents deemed dangerous to the peace. The Alien Enemies Act of July 6 granted the president the power to label as enemy aliens any residents who were citizens of a country at war with America, prompting an outflow of French émigrés. Then came the capstone of these horrendous measures: the Sedition Act of July 14, which rendered it a crime to speak or publish “any false, scandalous, or malicious” writings against the U.S. government or Congress “with intent to defame . . . or to bring them . . . into contempt or disrepute.”3 If found guilty, the perpetrators could face up to two thousand dollars in fines and two years in prison.

For Republicans, however, the most salient feature of the Sedition Act was that it violated the First Amendment of the Constitution.

Of the quartet of laws intended to silence dissent, the Sedition Act proved the most pernicious; indictments were brought against Republican editors based on flimsy, trumped-up charges. Some people were hauled into court for the heinous crime of setting up a liberty pole with the banner: “No Stamp Act; no Sedition, no Alien-Bill; no Land Tax; Downfall to the Tyrants of America; Peace and Retirement to the President.”32

Formerly skeptical about aspects of the Alien and Sedition Acts, he now gave them full-throated support and ranted about the need to punish people, especially the foreign born who libeled government officials: “Renegade aliens conduct more than one of the most incendiary

presses in the U[nited] States and yet in open contempt and defiance of the laws they are permitted to continue their destructive labours. Why are they not sent away?”

His vision now appeared to be so steeped in gloom that one wonders how much depression warped his judgment in later years. The ebullient hopefulness of his early days as treasury secretary seemed to be in eclipse.

Of the nine American presidents who owned slaves—a list that includes his fellow Virginians Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—only Washington set free all of his slaves.

The intellectual spoilsport among the founding fathers, Hamilton never believed in the perfectibility of human nature and regularly violated what became the first commandment of American politics: thou shalt always be optimistic when addressing the electorate. He shrank from the campaign rhetoric that flattered Americans as the most wonderful, enlightened people on earth and denied that they had anything to learn from European societies. He was incapable of the resolutely uplifting themes that were to become mandatory in American politics. The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.

Where Hamilton looked at the world through a dark filter and had a better sense of human limitations, Jefferson viewed the world through a rose-colored prism and had a better sense of human potentialities. Both Hamilton and Jefferson believed in democracy, but Hamilton tended to be more suspicious of the governed and Jefferson of the governors.

The three terms of Federalist rule had been full of dazzling accomplishments that Republicans, with their extreme apprehension of federal power, could never have achieved. Under the tutelage of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, the Federalists had bequeathed to American history a sound federal government with a central bank, a funded debt, a high credit rating, a tax system, a customs service, a coast guard, a navy, and many other institutions that would guarantee the strength to preserve liberty. They activated critical constitutional doctrines that gave the American charter flexibility, forged the bonds of nationhood, and lent an energetic tone to the executive branch in foreign and domestic policy. Hamilton, in particular, bound the nation through his fiscal programs in a way that no Republican could have matched. He helped to establish the rule of law and the culture of capitalism at a time when a revolutionary utopianism and a flirtation with the French Revolution still prevailed among too many Jeffersonians. With their reverence for states’ rights, abhorrence of central authority, and cramped interpretation of the Constitution, Republicans would have found it difficult, if not impossible, to achieve these historic feats.

It was the northern economic system that embodied the mix of democracy and capitalism that was to constitute the essence of America in the long run.

The Constitution did more than just tolerate slavery: it actively rewarded it. Timothy

Throughout his career, Hamilton had been an unusually tolerant man with enlightened views on slavery, native Americans, and Jews. His whole vision of American manufacturing had been predicated on immigration. Now, embittered by his personal setbacks, he sometimes betrayed his own best nature.

Because the case touched on two momentous constitutional issues, freedom of the press and trial by jury, he waived any fee.

As John Quincy Adams remarked, the Louisiana Purchase was “an assumption of implied power greater in itself, and more comprehensive in its consequences, than all the assumptions of implied powers in the years of the Washington and Adams administrations.”31 When it suited his convenience, Jefferson set aside his small-government credo with compunction.

Political parties were still fluid organizations based on personality cults, and no politician could afford to have his honor impugned.

At one point, speaking of politics, he said, “If they break this union, they will break my heart.”69 He could have left no more fitting political epitaph.

“Had I read Sterne more and Voltaire less, I should have known the world was wide enough for Hamilton and me.”